'Won't You Please Help Me Get My Son Home': Peonage, Patronage, and Protest in the World War II Urban South

30 Pages Posted: 4 Sep 2015

See all articles by Risa L. Goluboff

Risa L. Goluboff

University of Virginia School of Law

Date Written: September 2, 2015

Abstract

During World War II, young African Americans from southern cities left their homes for what appeared to be patriotic job opportunities harvesting sugar cane in Florida. When returning workers described peonage and slavery instead, parents worried about their children's safety. After attempting to contact their children directly, the parents appealed to the federal government. Their decision to mobilize the federal government and the strategies they used to do so reveal important aspects of wartime African American protest that historians have previously overlooked. This article focuses on families instead of atomized individuals, revealing the importance of families, neighborhood, and communities to the emergence of rights consciousness. It also complicates the historiographical dichotomy between rights consciousness and patronage relationships. Patrons served as liaisons with law enforcement agencies and provided links to a law-centered rights consciousness. For many historians, until protest exits the realm of patronage ties, it is not really protest, and once interactions with government themselves become bureaucratized they cease to be protest any longer. The efforts of the peons' families challenge both ends of this narrow category of protest; they both used patronage relations to lodge their protests and also forged rights consciousness within the legal process itself.

Suggested Citation

Goluboff, Risa L., 'Won't You Please Help Me Get My Son Home': Peonage, Patronage, and Protest in the World War II Urban South (September 2, 2015). Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 777, 1999, Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2654787

Risa L. Goluboff (Contact Author)

University of Virginia School of Law ( email )

580 Massie Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/Faculty.nsf/FHPbI/9230

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